But in all political
questions the primary assembly in the Roman Forum remained alone
entitled to act; and it is obvious at a glance, that this assembly
was no longer, in its composition or in its collective action, what
it had been when all the persons entitled to vote could exercise their
privilege as citizens by leaving their farms in the morning and
returning home the same evening. Moreover the government--whether
from want of judgment, from negligence, or from any evil design, we
cannot tell--no longer as formerly enrolled the communities admitted
to the franchise after 513 in newly instituted election-districts, but
included them along with others in the old; so that gradually each
tribe came to be composed of different townships scattered over the
whole Roman territory.

Election-districts such as these, containing
on an average 8000--the urban naturally having more, the rural fewer
--persons entitled to vote, without local connection or inward unity,
no longer admitted of any definite leading or of any satisfactory
previous deliberation; disadvantages which must have been the more
felt, since the voting itself was not preceded by any free debate.
Moreover, while the burgesses had quite sufficient capacity to discern
their communal interests, it was foolish and utterly ridiculous to
leave the decision of the highest and most difficult questions which
the power that ruled the world had to solve to a well-disposed but
fortuitous concourse of Italian farmers, and to allow the nomination
of generals and the conclusion of treaties of state to be finally
judged of by people who understood neither the grounds nor the
consequences of their decrees.

In all matters transcending mere
communal affairs the Roman primary assemblies accordingly played a
childish and even silly part. As a rule, the people stood and gave
assent to all proposals; and, when in exceptional instances they of
their own impulse refused assent, as on occasion of the declaration
of war against Macedonia in 554,(42) the policy of the market-place
certainly made a pitiful opposition--and with a pitiful issue--to the
policy of the state.